SOUL SURMISE

NEW YEAR'S SHORE

A first draft surmise from our walk on the beach this afternoon

 

Old Year’s Day 

Last walk

On Ballycastle sands

My soul drawn

To debris all strewn across

Beached, out of the memory of the Moyle

 

Plastic bottles that it needed spewed out

Like toxic vomit from its stomach

Immoral impediments to this holy beauty

 

Driftwood crashing in, landing with a pummel

Like a life that’s done, vocation over

Yet still so animate, decorating our horizon

 

Seaweed, there every night and day

Scattered as if we need something familiar

Not wanted but ever invading our perspective.

 

And the sea glass swept in and out, up and down

Honed by the friction of tidal scrub

Until like treasure we pick it up, a shining jewel.

 

All the good, the tears of joy

Whirled in the bad, the crying ache

Washed in on waves now gone

May we know grace and mercy

As we walk

By an ocean’s buoyant mysteries

Of New Year's shore.

MY #1 RECORD OF THE YEAR - 2011-2023

As I look over Stocki's very Favourite Records since 2011, there is much evidence that I went for the outsider, the less heard. These albums beat U2 to #1 for two albums. Springsteen and Cave made good albums that maybe should have. Snow Patrol's Wildness! What amazes me is that my beloved Over the Rhine have had maybe 3 top 5s and 2 that only missed by 1 place.

I still hold to the vast majority of these. They still mean a lot to me. 

My #1 RECORDS have been:

 

2011 - RON SEXSMITH - LONG PLAYER, LATE BLOOMER

2012 - BILL FAY - LIFE IS PEOPLE

2013 - JASON ISBELL - SOUTHEASTERN

2014 - STEVE TAYLOR & THE PERFECT FOIL - GOLIATH

2015 - GLEN HANSARD - DIDN'T HE RAMBLE

2016 - DAVID C CLEMENTS - THE LONGEST DAY IN HISTORY

2017 - ROMANTICA - SHADOWLANDS

2018 - KARINE POLWART - LAWS OF MOTION

2019 - THE ORPHAN BRIGADE - TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

2020 - JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNIT - REUNIONS

2021 - JOY OLADOKUN - IN DEFENSE OF MY OWN HAPPINESS

2022 - BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN - ROLLING GOLDEN HOLY

2023 - ARBORIST - THE ENDLESS SEQUNCE OF DEAD ZEROES

THE CHRISTMAS REFUGEE

Refugees. 

There doesn’t seem to be a day goes by without a news headline about the movement of people. Drownings in the Mediterranean, babies washed up on beaches. Caught up in war, persecution or famine, people are forced to leave their homes and seek refuge somewhere else, often risking their lives in the process. 

Jesus was a refugee. His parents fearing their baby son’s murder at the hands of a tyrant king had to run for cover in Egypt. All Jacob’s children, who would lead the Tribes of Israel had done. the same because of famine hundreds of years before.    

The nativity story opens up one of the most contentious and serious issues facing the world today. How do we respond to the desperate on our borders?

American singer Josh Ritter gave the nativity a contemporary slant in his song Gospel Of Mary. 

This little family sets out with hope of something better:

 

We prayed our prayers, we broke our bread

With others who had even less

Till finally all we had were dreams

And we hoped that they would fill us

 

Soon however the sinister world of the modern refugee kicks in. Duped for a place in a container, Joseph dies, eventually Mary is put in chains and in the end she and her son are separated. 

Ritter comes across as a 60’s protest singer. Imagine Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan if you will, asking some serious questions of the richest nation on earth.

Eventually Ritter brings it all around to the original Mary, Joseph and baby. The ancient texts of Scripture are full of migrants. From Genesis to Revelation the entire Bible is about people moving countries. So it is with Jesus. As Ritter sings:

The holy family got away

A simpler time, a simpler place

And Egypt stretched out it's great hand

To welcome them with mercy

 

The inference is clear. As Jesus was welcomed with mercy we should welcome those seeking refuge among us. Indeed, the least of these would be the baby’s greatest fixation when he grew up and started preaching. 

Jesus said that those who would get into heaven were those who fed him, gave him a drink, gave him a room and clothes. When do we do this to him? When we do it to the least of these. So, the call is there to respond to the stranger, the homeless, the fleeing asylum seekers. 

The Old Testament was also commanding a welcoming of the refugee. It is mentioned in Deuteronomy but expanded on in Leviticus. Leviticus chapter 19 verse 34 says, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” The people of God knew what it was to live in another country and were to treat people well, remembering that they were not. 

Herod attempted to rid himself of Jesus call to be humble and serve others. Our we also too comfortable and fear our entitlement would be under threat of we brought in the refugees. There is no doubt that welcoming batch after batch of refugees into our country might threaten our wealth and comfort. 

It might be hard to sustain. Actually it will be hard to sustain. However, if we learn anything from this refugee baby it should be that our wealth at the cost of other people’s misery is something that the prophets condemned.

CHRISTMAS DISTURBS ME

 

"When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi." (Matthew 2:16)

 

Christmas is not without disturbance. Does the Herod episode not disturb you? It disturbs me. Why was Herod disturbed with the news of the Messiah’s birth? This is the long awaited one, fulfilment of all those prophecies. 

These stargazers have arrived from the east to herald it in. Instead of celebration, Herod is spooked and Matthew says, “all of Jerusalem with him.” 

Herod gathered all the religious leaders and they opened the Scripture to find the meaning of all these nativity stories. They looked into Micah’s prophecy and there it was, 

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,

though you are small among the clans of Judah,

out of you will come for me

    one who will be ruler over Israel,” (Matthew 2:6)

When the Magi don’t return, as Herod had asked them to, the dam of his anger bursts. Like some Game Of Thrones scene you can see him check the scroll again, then swipe the table clean, cups and bowls smashing and splintering and the sacred papyrus rip, like the veil in the temple later would. 

Herod summoned his troops whose horses hooves thunder out of Jerusalem to go and kill all the babies, under two years of age, in the Bethlehem area. 

It is a challenge for those of us who have the truth, who look it up, lick our fingers and turn the pages of the Holy Book. 

Herod’s problem was not that he didn’t have the truth. Herod had too much truth. He knew that this baby was going to change everything. It was going to demand changes personally, materially and politically and he wasn’t up for the truth to have its way.

And what of us? Are there places in our lives where we have the truth but refuse to welcome it into our lives. No, we don’t kill Jesus, we sing carols about him, but do we kill his revolution? 

John Stott said that the greatest evangelical heresy of the Twentieth Century was our lack of social justice. I remember it being labelled a “social gospel” like it was the heresy. 

Was that a misunderstanding of the Scriptures or just that the cost of getting involved in God’s Kingdom coming and his will being done on earth would impinge too much on our comfortable lives? What other Jesus truth do we dismiss seemingly as wrong but actually just because we do not want to surrender to it? Loving our Palestinian neighbours?

Herod knew the truth but couldn’t handle the price this baby would cost him. And me?

DUST/DIVINITY by JOY OLADOKUN - Spiritual Songs Of 2024

Joy Oladokun is one of the songwriters keeping God in the conversation of the zeitgeist. On her brilliant new record. Observations From A Crowded Room, she has a number of spiritual depth charges going on. She is perhaps the ultimate in soul surmising.

I have been particularly drawn to some lines in Dust/Divinity where tells us where she is on this God thing.

 

'Cause though it hurts me to believe, it kills me not to
And I am trying to find my way through the middle

I surmise that that is how so many of our 20s and 30s who grew up in church feel today. What they were raised on hasn't equipped them well enough for the challenges of secular world yet though they stop going to church being bereft of it doesn't satisfy either. As Joy sings on:

 

And I am desperate to receive every good thing
From now until eternity, from dust until divinity

 

As a pastor who cares deeply about the generation who have attempted to deconstruct the ancient faith I long to be able to lead them to what Oladokun describes as the "middle".

I have surprised myself about my new obsession with Rome. One of the many things I love about the city is that it has reconstructed endless amounts of times, you can see a few of them in the one Basilica - San Clemente - but it has never got rid of the ancient. You are likely to find a thousand year old wall in some brand new state of the art building.

The finding your way to the "middle" as Joy talks about it, is knowing what to keep and what to let go of and how the reconstruction can bring out the best in the ancient parts that we do keep. As my friend Doug says,  "There is sustainable theology". What that is, is the journey of the pilgrim. I am keen to track it. Oladokun has given us a wonderful song companion for the road.

 

 

GOD WITH US

Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields sent me off on a theological journey.

In his book The Nazareth Manifesto; Being With God, Sam suggests that we are a society and a church full of fixers. We want to put everything right. We have planners and organisers and doers of putting it all together again. Yet, Sam reminds us, in a reality check, not everything can be fixed.

As an illustration Sam takes us into the novel, later film, The English Patient. In the story, set in the Sahara, an affair begins between Almásy and Katherine. Katherine’s husband Geoffrey finds out and in attempted murder-suicide, deliberately crashes his plane, narrowly missing Almásy. Geoffrey is killed instantly, Katherine is seriously injured. Almásy carries her to a cave, leaving her with provisions, and begins a three-day walk to get help.

Sam asks the question - was going for help the right decision or should he have stayed to be with his beloved Katherine in the last few days of her life? 

Sam then turns the question on us, the Church. Are we always so set on helping that we are not content to just be with? Indeed we seem to spend more time strategising and in committees envisioning and planning than actually being with those in need.

Sam talks about Jesus ministry and how he did ministry for three years, out of his 33 years on earth, and in a very important week changed everything, but how for 90% of his time on earth he was simply with humanity, doing nothing. 

Of course this is the incarnation that I have blogging and preaching about for years. Yet, Sam’s illustration of Almásy’s error of going for help instead of just being with struck me deep.

Being with might be our greatest call. The Christmas season is when we hear it is, loud and clear - the child will be called Emmanuel which means God with us! 

Now there is Good News. The best news. When all seems broken and even when it sees that it will not be fixed, God is with us.

Of course Sam was not suggesting we don't do any helping... but the word with might be a key word in theology and being with might be as Jesus-like as anything!

 

Emmanuel - God With Us

 

May we know God with us

 

In the joy of family together

And in the sadness of empty chairs.

May we know God with us 

 

In the blessing of our grace nourished souls

And in the sins and doubts within us.

May we know God with us

 

In the abundance of what we are given

And in the poverty of so many around us. 

May we know God with us

 

In our city blessed with peace and hope

And in a world that is still at war.

Emmanuel - God with us

 

Wherever we are

Whoever we are with

However we feel

Whatever ways we are broken.

Emmanuel - God with us!

I WANT WHAT I DON'T NEED by VILLAGERS - Spiritual Songs of 2024

I stumbled across Culture Night on RTE and there was Conor O’Brien, who is Villagers, with an orchestra conducted by the awesome David Brophy singing I Want What I Don’t Need. I was enraptured. What a song.

 

And I want to feel like I'm in charge

Like an angry bull in a house of cards

And they'll all fall down when they don't take heed

Because I want what I don't need

 

Actually, every time I hear this song it stops my soul in its tracks. 

O’Brien is opening up what I think must be the most everyday, every moment dilemma of the modern human. What we need and what we are tempted to want that we have no need of.  

It reminded me of Rich Mullins’ (whom O’Brien will never have heard of) who sings: “I'd rather fight You for something I don't really want/Than to take what You give that I need”. 

Even the Christmas 2024 TV Call The Midwife dealt with this in a speech from Trixie, Lady Franklin, played by Helen George. Lady Franklin now living the high life in New York makes a fleeting return to Poplar helping a very poor woman deliver her baby in shocking conditions. 

Trixie speaks of the beauty and truth of the her work and the birth and then adds, “I have learned not to crave things that hurt me but I can’t stop craving the things that make me whole.” As in her vocation of serving those in need.

This is what this Villagers’ song is all about. It speaks to the individual soul and the entire society: 

 

And in the future I'll get better at

Buying shares and growing fat

And when there's less to share and I've gone to seed

I'll still want what I don't need

 

Jesus spoke of the wording of chasing things that last rather than things that fade away. He spoke of not worrying about things but seeking God and righteousness and/or justice. 

There are a lot of things out there that we don’t need. There are spiritual things that it would be good to have greed for.  

 

There's a fairytale we call "Free Will"

It was funny then, and it's funny still

And at the heart of it lies an endless greed

Because we want what we don't need.

 

Indeed.

HIS LAW IS LOVE

I was really taken by David C Clements version of O Holy Night at his Ulster Hall concert in Christmas week 2024. That smooth powerful voice singing:

 

"Truly he taught us to love one another 

His law is love and his Gospel peace”

 

There are many truths caught up in the nativity stories of Jesus but the over arching one is LOVE. Indeed, the entire Bible, reaching its crescendo in the Gospels, is about love. A God of love, who loves and asks love from us.  

A glance across this nativity scene will draw us in to a manger. Around it are shepherds and easter mystical star gazers. In the manger is God in flesh and bone. A God who the wish people didn’t dare use the name of but right here are shepherds and easter mystical star gazers. They are unclean in religious terms but the baby’s law is love and they are welcomed. Loved.

I wrote a poem for a Christmas event back in the 90s and had the  honour of having Duke Special sing on it with me reading the verses. Sadly no recordings though he might be very happy with that.

 

Who am I to find the one who has and will and can do all things

Unable to move

Unable to do sustain himself

At the breast of a teenage girl

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find the one who knows all there is to know, who decides what knowledge is

Unable to speak

Unable to answer

Just a cooing, crying bawling little bundle of baby

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find the one who fills the entire universe, before and beyond the stars

Confined to a moment

Confined to flesh and bone

Having his nappy changed by a carpenter

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find the God of heaven and eternity,

Leaving the company of angels

Leaving the absence of sorrow and pain

And with wild and holy nerve becoming vulnerable to germ and death squad

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find the King of Kings and Lord Of Lords

Becoming lower than all of us

Becoming the last of the last of us

To be the servant who sets us who should have been slaves free

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find the One who is holy holy holy

Be found in dirt and filth and straw

Be found in danger and a refugee

That we might find safety in a place beyond all fear

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who am I to find in this stable the indescribable truth

To find in this manger unbelievable gift

To find in these swaddling clothes a spectacular reality

That this baby is the gift of Christmas

A Saviour who is Christ the Lord

WHO AM I TO FIND YOUR LOVE

 

Who indeed but there it is laid down in straw on a Holy Night that changed the world.

 

1 JOHN 3 - See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! 

WE PRAY by COLDPLAY - Spiritual Songs of 2024

One of the 5 Spiritual Songs of 2024.

The one with the most massive impact has to be Coldplay’s We Pray. A central piece in their eclectic and excellent album Moon Music, we first heard this one right in the middle of their headline Glastonbury set. 

It reminded of Stormzy, taking Glastonbury to church on the same stage in 2019.

It was not the first time that Coldplay had touched on the worshipful. Broken and the title track on Everyday Life headed that way too but here was a song not only about prayer. It is a prayer.

It’s personal and very Biblical:

 

I pray we wake in, pray my friend will pull through

Pray as I take in onto others, I do

I pray in all your love, pray with every breath

Though I'm in the valley of the shadow of death

 

It goes cultural:

 

Pray that we speak in a tongue that is honest

And that we understand hearts be modest

Pray that she don't lose herself in the mirror

She's a queen, she's a goddess

 

And ends up with the hope of heaven:

 

And so we pray

I know somewhere that heaven is waiting

And so we pray

I know somewhere there's something amazing

And so we pray

I know somewhere we'll feel no pain

Until we make it to the end of the day

 

As I wrote in my review of that Everyday Life record I am not going to declare Chris Martin as your latest Christian superstar. Martin grew up in a Christian home and has constantly returned to that well for lyrical inspiration and as with We Pray some of the practices of his childhood. He has distanced himself from that evangelical branch of Christianity and now calls himself an all-theist. 

Perhaps We Pray is about all faith’s praying. No one can be against that. It seems to suggest that wishing might not be enough. The prayer word suggests something more robust. It caused us to do The Gospel According To... Coldplay in Fitzroy!

As a song for Glastonbury, it seems to me to be perfect. It never ceases to amaze me where a God, dismissed by a modern British culture, turns up so many times in the midst… see also Nick Cave and Charlie Mackesy!

A BABY IN STRAW - NO SOFT LANDING

 

READ JOHN 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome  it.

 

THOUGHT

Often times we have too soft a perspective on Christmas. I mean Mary laying the baby Jesus in a manger of straw, is a very gentle, quiet act. Don't believe that the night before was a silent night. Mary screamed the animal stall down. The morning after though doesn't disturb even the cattle, if there were any cattle.

However, I like to think that something else was afoot. That as Mary laid Jesus down the earth tremors at the  impact.  In my imagination I am seeing this gentle, meek bundle of baby arriving, having flown across two terrains to get here.

The first is the hurtle through history. From the hint in Genesis chapter 3 this The Word has been rocketing through history to become flesh. The second is that idea that in Graham Kendrick’s “from heaven you came helpless babe. From somewhere way far out there God arrives in skin and bone like a heavenly meteorite hurtling!    

When the God of all the universe landed wrapped in swaddling bands and lying innocuously on a bed of animal straw we should not be fooled by the gentleness of his arrival. In that moment the world shuddered.

It was as if the God who filled the entire Universe squeezed his vastness into a tiny little piece of semtax explosive and hurtled from the far end of the Universe like a meteorite and crashed into planet earth knocking it from the way things were to a hopefulness of the new way that it could be.

Here, in the nativity we see this absurd almost crazy revolution; King of the Universe in some backstreet manger; the humility of God becoming a servant of his creation; a God of justice loving and welcoming in those whom he was at enmity with; the blessedness of the poor.

Mary's Song spoke of thrones being brought down and the rich going away empty.The King of the day felt the tremor and sent his death squads to kill it at birth but on and on down through history there has been an eternal thud.  This was no soft landing.

 

POEM

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

Unseen but deeply felt

If never fully realised

By those who’ve never knelt

The tremors they ripple across all time

The poets at last can find their rhyme

Heavenly meteorite hurtling.

 

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

As usual but all amiss

History  stripped of how it was

To how from now on it is

The radical revolution all a shudder

Old way surrendering to this new other

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

 

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

Unnoticed but all askew

Thrones thrown out of kilter

The meek inherit what’s new

The repercussions spin out forever

Imaginers threading peace back together

Heavenly meteorite hurtling.

 

 

READ JOHN 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome  it.

 

THOUGHT

Often times we have too soft a perspective on Christmas. I mean Mary laying the baby Jesus in a manger of straw, is a very gentle, quiet act. Don't believe that the night before was a silent night. Mary screamed the animal stall down. The morning after though doesn't disturb even the cattle, if there were any cattle.

However, I like to think that something else was afoot. That as Mary laid Jesus down the earth tremors at the  impact.  In my imagination I am seeing this gentle, meek bundle of baby arriving, having flown across two terrains to get here.

The first is the hurtle through history. From the hint in Genesis chapter 3 this The Word has been rocketing through history to become flesh. The second is that idea that in Graham Kendrick’s “from heaven you came helpless babe. From somewhere way far out there God arrives in skin and bone like a heavenly meteorite hurtling!    

When the God of all the universe landed wrapped in swaddling bands and lying innocuously on a bed of animal straw we should not be fooled by the gentleness of his arrival. In that moment the world shuddered.

It was as if the God who filled the entire Universe squeezed his vastness into a tiny little piece of semtax explosive and hurtled from the far end of the Universe like a meteorite and crashed into planet earth knocking it from the way things were to a hopefulness of the new way that it could be.

Here, in the nativity we see this absurd almost crazy revolution; King of the Universe in some backstreet manger; the humility of God becoming a servant of his creation; a God of justice loving and welcoming in those whom he was at enmity with; the blessedness of the poor.

Mary's Song spoke of thrones being brought down and the rich going away empty.The King of the day felt the tremor and sent his death squads to kill it at birth but on and on down through history there has been an eternal thud.  This was no soft landing.

 

POEM

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

Unseen but deeply felt

If never fully realised

By those who’ve never knelt

The tremors they ripple across all time

The poets at last can find their rhyme

Heavenly meteorite hurtling.

 

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

As usual but all amiss

History  stripped of how it was

To how from now on it is

The radical revolution all a shudder

Old way surrendering to this new other

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

 

Heavenly meteorite hurtling

Unnoticed but all askew

Thrones thrown out of kilter

The meek inherit what’s new

The repercussions spin out forever

Imaginers threading peace back together

Heavenly meteorite hurtling.